Documents frequently require comments or editorial changes from a preliminary draft. The user wishing to edit the draft document may be editing his own work or that of another. In the state of technology today, this task is often undertaken using a word processing system on a computer.
To edit a draft document, the editor may call up the document for display on the screen of the computer. Then, using an input device such as a mouse, a touch-screen input controller, or other device, the editor directs the location of a cursor to locate where additions, deletions, or changes are to occur. Although the use of a mouse or other cursor locator device has proven to be a major advancement over previous devices for locating a cursor, use of such a device still requires that the editor take his hands off the keyboard on which he is inputting data and/or text to take control of the peripheral input device such as the mouse. He then manipulates the mouse to direct the cursor to the desired location in the document, and then he must return his hand to the keyboard for further work. This sequence takes time and interrupts the flow of the editors work on the document.
Various tools have been developed for navigating around a document using voice commands. Most commonly, a standard set of commands which correspond to the navigation commands of the word processing application are stored in a voice memory. Then, when the editor utters the command, the command is recognized by comparison with the stored memory, and the navigation command is carried out. For example, the editor will speak the word "sentence" a number of times to "train" the voice recognition unit to recognize this sound from this editor. Then, when the editor is working on a document and utters the word "sentence", the voice recognition unit recognizes the command and issues the function command to move the cursor to the beginning of the next sentence, exactly as if the editor had pressed the function keys on his keyboard for this command in the word processing program.
This known system has proven to be a boon in operation but, in its own way, has been limited to the standard commands that are provided by the word processor. However, even using such a system the editor may faced with a lengthy document with few if any visual elements to guide him through the document during the editing process. Thus, there remains a need for a system that is adaptable to word processing and editing systems, spread-sheet programs, computer assisted drawing programs, or any other applications in which an editor makes changes to an existing file which viewing the file on a graphical user interface and which provides visual "aids to navigation" to assist in the editing process.